HDFC Bank, India's second largest private sector lender, will be launching a digital wallet and market place for various online merchants, reports the Times of India. The launch of a wallet marks a huge shift in strategy for the lender which is currently the largest issuer of credit cards in the country - over 5.5 million outstanding credit cards at the end of October according to Reserve Bank of India data. Speaking to the publication, the bank said that it is changing its strategy as it is seeing a shift in e-commerce from desktops to mobiles. The launch of a wallet would also enable contactless payments over mobiles using near-field communications (NFC). The bank is also pushing its customers to adopt mobile banking and recently improved its application which now allows 75 banking transactions. HDFC Bank recently beat rival ICICI Bank to the top position in mobile banking transactions. At the end of October, HDFC Bank logged in mobile banking transactions worth Rs 3,450 crore, while ICICI Bank logged in Rs 1,416 crore. The TOI report also says that HDFC Bank is the leader in processing card payment for merchants and accounts for 40% of e-commerce transactions (a bold claim, we tried to see where they got this data from). It will also be interesting to see how their new wallet will impact existing wallet players such as Paytm and MobiKwik. It is interesting to note that ICICI Bank earlier this month launched its NFC enabled cards in three cities. State Bank of…
